I still remember the first time USB OTG was shown to me in a video demo, featuring the Nokia N8. It was so cool to see that mobile devices could be independent and act as hosts to peripherals like a keyboard and mouse or even a full sized external hard drive, but the most handy use case was always a pen drive. The Nokia N8 came with a USB OTG cable in the box, which let you turn the micro USB port on the phone into a full size USB and in turn that connected to the peripherals. Now, imagine if you have the same functionality, yet you don’t need a cable and happily act as a host right away. That’s exactly what Verbatim has done with its USB OTG Pen Drive. We bought a couple of these from Hong Kong and have unboxed it and demoed it in front of a camera for you. A simple idea, brought to life –
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ3ir_6kCik
As you can notice from the video above. There is a neat slider that reveals the micro USB on one end and the full USB on the other, making it a simple plug and play transfer device for phones as well as PCs.
We personally think it would have been much better if the micro USB could detach with a cable while the pen drive is still connected to the PC, making it more useful than now. In this current implementation, only one interface is visible and functional.
Yeah, this is a USB 3.0 device, but the micro USB part is USB 2.0, which we used for connecting to a Galaxy Note 3, which has built-in support for OTG. This works with any other device that supports OTG and yes, the legacy ones like Nokia N8 too.
We guess this will be the fastest way to carry files from a phone to a PC and vice versa. A really neat implementation here, from Verbatim. We hope to see an extended cable or some sort of contraption to make both the functions work at the same time, but for now this is something novel and cool. Sooner than later, these kinds of OTG pen drives will hit the market with a force, through many implementations and variants, so hold on till it does and keep an eye on our YouTube channel for really cool stuff like this.